Yes, the enterprise modeling world has done a lot of work on capturing intention, none of which is notably rigorous.
To take nothing away from the RMODP work William cites, I can also call your attention to the OMG Business Motivation Metamodel (which really came out of the
DAMA Business Rules Group): http://www.omg.org/spec/BMM/
And to The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF): http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/
And neither last nor least, the “motivation” component of the LEADING Practice work, a joint effort by the Global University Alliance:
http://www.leadingpractice.com/
And if we must, the Mission component of the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF, erstwhile DODAF, MODAF, NAF). Here I recommend the Wikipedia article first,
and then pursuit of the links only if you are deeply into this stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Defense_Architecture_Framework
All of these are about making some kind of formal model whose intent is (among others) to capture organizational intent. The BMM is the only one of the above
that is (a) small, and (b) entirely about motivation/intent. But in terms of formal ontology for the purpose, none of them really comes close.
-Ed
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Work: +1 301-975-3528
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"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority."
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of William Frank
Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 12:30 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Intentionality Best Practices
The ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing, Draft spec for the Enterprise Viewpoint is based on speech act analysis.
For example,
6.2.2 community object: A composite enterprise object that represents a community. Components of a community object are objects of the community represented.
objective (of an <X>): Practical advantage or intended effect, expressed as preferences about future states.
NOTE 1 – Some objectives are ongoing, some are achieved once met.
6.3.5 process: A collection of steps taking place in a prescribed manner and leading to an objective.
6.5.2 commitment: An action resulting in an obligation by one or more of the participants in the act to comply with a rule or perform a contract.
6.5.3 declaration: An action that establishes a state of affairs in the environment of the object making the declaration.
NOTE – The essence of a declaration is that, by virtue of the act of declaration itself and the authority of the object or its principal,
it causes a state of affairs to come into existence outside the object making the declaration.
6.5.4 delegation:
ITU-T X.911 ISO/IEC 15414
05-10-06
Though intended largely as a means of intention-driven systems specification, there are also executable implementations of these concepts.
I instituted this work in the late 1990s as chair of the US delegation to RM-ODP.
In reality, every single thing a computer does is the implicit result of some human intention. This is simply hidden as well as it can be, to the detriment of the quality of the systems get built, as engineers
do not feel responsibility for their intentions, or the need to express them, and even to the detriments of our future.
For example, when a funds transfer system is provided with a 'feed' of transactions, each transaction provided is implicitly a speech act request for the system to execute the transaction. When this system
in turn provides a data warehouse with a feed of executed transactions, each of these is implicitly a speech act assertion that these transaction have been executed. Finally, a query of the data warehouse might ask whether a given transaction has been executed.
Syntactically, the contents of these 'feeds' and queries could be identical.
I wrote a patent application in 1999 for service interfaces comprised of pairs, the first member being a structure that described the speech act, the second being the propositional frame to which the speech
act applied, expressed, for example, in XML.
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 11:20 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Leo,
For any subject you can mention, there are many volumes written
about it. That is one reason why I say that there is no such thing
as a primitive where analysis stops: it is always possible to do
a deeper analysis.
But don't give up. As Calvin Coolidge said,
CC
> You can't do everything at once, but you can do something at once.
For example, the difference between 'look' and 'see' is intention.
That's something simple we can start with.
This gets into speech acts, which are all intentional. In fact,
every "action" is performed by some human or animal for some purpose.
People do represent these things. Don't give up.